We scaled a site to 369k PVs.
Here’s how.
Introduction
At the beginning, this client had 0 SEO content, outdated websites with horrid structure and was unable to get more than 10,000 visitors a month.
After implementing our Unique Systematic SEO Processes (USSP), in only 6 months, this site went from 0 to 369,176 visitors.
Our goal is for you to grasp enough understanding of SEO that you’ll be able to either replicate these results for yourself, or hire somebody awesome to do it for you.
It doesn’t matter if you’re completely new to the world of SEO or if you’re a battle hardened veteran. At the end you’ll have actionable steps to get better results with your company’s SEO efforts. Be it visitors, leads, or ultimately, saless.
What is USSP?
In short, USSP is a method we’ve developed over the past 15 years as a digital marketing agency. We apply these processes with all our clients, no matter how big or small, and it’s always been a reliable method of how to grow somebody’s SEO results reliably.
Who was the client and what was his problem?
We onboarded the client 1st of June 2021 and their main issue was lack of organic traffic on their site. There were no SEO optimized articles, very rough site structure, and 0 intent based queries. This all resulted in website driving only up to 10K people a month, never more.
With the help of our systemised templated strategy, we did a comprehensive Technical Audit of the site. For how to do an in-depth audit, we recommend you follow this article. Or, you could hire someone to do it for you. You’ll learn how to hire the right people later on.
The Audit told us that this was basically a dead site (in terms of its growth). No rankings, no existing content that was focused on what they wanted to do as they just acquired the domain.
You can see major ranking improvements after correcting your website structure and optimizing it for Technical SEO, but in a new site where there’s not much to track, we surely laid out a very strong site structure which made the growth we had possible.
Why did he approach us?
Boba Digital is a boutique digital marketing agency specializing in providing SEO, PPC, and Facebook Ads services for growing brands.
Unlike other agencies, Boba Digital prides itself on expertise, delivering results, and offering unparalleled service for its clients and partners.
And with team members across the globe—spanning the Americas, Europe, and Asia—you can be sure that you’re getting the best talent, regardless of location.
As a full service SEO agency, we mapped a systematic process for each part of SEO:
- Technical Audit & Making changes
- Deciding Key Pages (Target Pages)
- Keyword Research
- On/Off Page SEO
- Link Building
Right now, the client is easily driving 10K+ organic visitors a day, resulting in increased sales and users.
As we want you to achieve the same results for your website, we’ve decided to lay out all our processes and techniques here, so you can follow them step by step, understand each step and so make your website become a client magnet.
Introduction to SEO
In this chapter, we’ll briefly explain the main aspects of SEO for you to understand everything we’ll talk about later on.
In short, SEO is Search Engine Optimization and its purpose is for people to see you first in their Google search results when they are looking for you or anything else related to you and your company.
You’ve experienced it yourself, when Googling something, it’ll be most likely on your first page of search. But sometimes, if there is no SEO done and the competition is big, the website can end up on 2nd, 3rd, or god forbid, even 4th page.
In a little more complex explanation, both Google and Bing use special “bots” (crawlers) to look at all pages on the web and they collect information about them. Then they create a vast index folder that responds to key search words. It’s that way so the search engine can pull out as relevant information as possible when you’re looking for something.
Then, programmed algorithms check all the pages in the index and then based on various factors, such as ranking factors or signals, determine in which order the pages will appear when you are searching.
An SEO expert will understand how to use these indexes and algorithms for his own benefit so his page appears first. Or at least as close to it as possible.
Unlike paid search ads, you can’t pay search engines to get higher organic search rankings, which means SEO experts have to put in the work.
SEO on it’s own is a big animal and quite complex as well, but in this post, we’ll guide you through each and every step you need to take if you want your website to have more visitors than ever before.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is about making sure that the technical aspects of a website are in order, which then increases the ranking of each page in the search engine. We’ll specifically talk about site structure, loading speed and crawling accessibility.
Technical SEO is a part of on-page SEO. It’s main focus is to improve the specific elements of your website in order to rank higher. It’s the opposite of off-page SEO, which focuses on generating exposure through other mediums.
Fixing site structure
Your site needs to have a defined structure, because without it, it’ll just be a random collection of pages and blog posts. Your users need this structure to navigate on your site, to click from one page to another. Google also uses the structure of your site to determine what content is important and what is less relevant. This guide tells you everything you need to know about site structure.
Often, we visit sites that load slower than a snail, and we end up closing the tab out of frustration. Do you think Google likes such websites? Nope. That’s where technical SEO comes in. Even if you have used all the keywords properly in your content, a slight error in the technical SEO can drag down your ranking significantly.
First, you need to take a good look at the current market. Ýou will see that most people visit websites using their mobile. So, your website must be mobile optimized. Furthermore, your site must fit well on any device, be it mobile, tablet or PC. This will ensure the visitor gets a seamless experience no matter which device he prefers.
Next, you have to avoid plagiarism. Checking content for plagiarism before publishing has become the most important part of technical SEO these days. Of course, 100% unique content will help you rank the highest. However, even if you cannot manage it to be perfectly 100% unique, you can at least strive for 90%. If the uniqueness is below 90%, then you might have to struggle to rank high.
Many developers don’t realize that structuring the site properly is one of the most crucial parts for increasing the website’s usability. This is because your audience and Google understands most of the content by taking a look through the site’s structure.
A proper site structure helps the audience to navigate the content easily. For instance, if they are looking for some product and they are unable to find it, there are chances that they will not come back to your site again. Hence, lacking proper structure can become a reason for losing customers, which you definitely don’t want.
Besides helping the visitors get everything in place, site structuring is also important for SEO ranking.
- Google Understands Your Website Content Better
Google is tough and loves order. So if your site is all messed up, it’s time for some cleaning! The search engine will favor your site much more if it is well structured. Why? Because when the structure is appropriate, Google instantly understands what your content is about and how to rank it among the other similar content. Including an index of the content at the start will also help with the ranking!
- There is No Conflicting Content
You create several content pieces so that all of them can work for you, not against you. So why confuse Google and make it’s job harder? If your website is talking about your software or services, you can have more than one blog for that on your site.
However, if your website is not structured well, Google will not understand which content is the most important for your business. To ensure this doesn’t happen, you will have to pay special attention to taxonomy structure and internal linking. This will help the content work successfully for your brand!
Now that you know why site structuring is important let’s move on to ‘how’, so you can do it for yourself! Most SEO experts say that the site structure looks like a pyramid where the homepage rests at the top. The structure of the pyramid in descending form is:
- Homepage
- Major categories
- Subcategories (if needed)
- Blogs/posts/pages
The homepage is always the first major part of the structure, followed by the website categories. If your business is quite large, then you will need subcategories. Depending on the size of the site, you will have posts or pages listed below the categories or the subcategories.
Homepage
Your homepage rules your website. It is from the homepage where you can drive the audience to a particular post. We know that you want the visitors to go through as much content on your site as possible, but don’t list them all at once on the homepage.
This will suffocate the page and might also confuse Google, let alone visitors. Instead, list only content which is super important for your business. This will also help Google track down your website’s vital pages and push their ranking higher.
A good homepage should also lead to effortless navigation through the site. To make sure that the navigation is on point, you will need two important things:
- Menu: Your homepage must have a proper menu to help your visitors navigate the site in one go. If you have a lot of content to add to the menu, then do not hesitate to add more than one menu on the page.
- Breadcrumb trail: Breadcrumb trails are clickable links that can take your audience to a certain page you desire. You can add some of these to your homepage, too, for easier navigation.
Make sure that you are not adding too much content in the menu or the breadcrumb trail because that again will trouble the SEO ranking!
Categories, Subcategories, and Tags
When you group blogs or posts into categories and tags, it is called taxonomies. Making a taxonomically structured website helps the audience find everything relevant to a topic at the same place. If you are selling multiple products on your website, then make sure you have categorized them properly .
For example, when somebody starts an online store, you will see two major categories- men and women. Now, if their shop is larger, they can further divide it into subcategories. For instance, for the women’s category, they can have subcategories like western wear, winter clothing, shoes, accessories, etc.
Tags are another way of taxonomically presenting your content. When adding tags to your blogs, make sure that you do not add unique tags in every post. You might think it’s necessary, but Google doesn’t. So better use one tag for at least three similar posts. This will help Google rank your brand tags higher on the web.
Speed Issues
Website owners have a tendency to completely overlook their site’s loading speed, and that’s a grave ranking mistake. Did you know that the loading speed has the highest impact on customer experience? Reports suggest that even a second’s delay in the loading time can bring you 7% less conversion in a day, which doesn’t seem like much, but imagine your daily conversions are 100k+…
So if you haven’t already fixed the speed issues of your site, here’s a quick guide for you.
Reduce the number of HTTP requests
HTTP requests often take a lot of unnecessary time and increase the loading time of the site. You can open the browser developer’s tool in Chrome and fix this issue by reducing the number of total HTTP requests. As each request takes time, reducing them will help you speed up the loading.
Optimize the JavaScript code
Almost every website uses JavaScript for obvious user-friendly reasons. However, developers often do not optimize the code, for which the website loading takes a lot of time. If the code is not fully optimized, the site can face a common issue called ‘render-blocking JavaScript’. The best ways of dealing with this issue are:
- Deleting the bulk external JavaScript files
- Using inline JavaScript
- Using asynchronous JavaScript loading
- Deferring the loading until the whole page is visible
Use CDN (Content Delivery Network)
CDN helps you make sure that visitors who are located far away from the website server can get a quick loading time regardless of the distance. It does so by wisely placing plenty of servers in various geographic locations. Some of the best CDN services that you can try are: Cloudflare & Jetpack CDN
Remove the unnecessary overheads
Overhead is much like the cache data of your phone that must be cleaned from time to time for better performance. If you allow overhead to get collected on your site, the loading time will be stretched far too long. At times it also becomes a reason for server time out, which pisses off the visitors instantly. Two major tools that you can use to get hold of this issue are:
- phpMyAdmin
- WordPress Command Line Interface (WP-CLI)
Optimize CSS
CSS is the styling code of your website, and it, too, requires proper optimization. To optimize the CSS, you can follow the tips below:
- If you have more than one CSS file, then combine them into a single file.
- Try using inline CSS in place of external CSS.
- Determine the loading time of a CSS with the help of ‘media types.’
Enable OPcache
If your site uses PHP for coding, then make sure the OPcache is enabled. Certain website hosting platforms have it enabled automatically, but if it isn’t, you can easily do it manually.
Optimize large media files
Do you know that large images and videos can double up the loading time? Yes, you read that right! To ensure that it doesn’t happen to your site, upload small-sized images and videos or compress the large-sized ones before publishing them.
Check that no files are missing
If some file is missing from your coding data, then also the loading speed can be slow. In the worst-case scenario, the visitor might also get a 404 error message when they try opening the site. We know that finding the cause of the problem is important, but if you are in a hurry, you can quickly restore data from the recent backup. This will help you instantly without having to wait for hours!
Building Proper SILOs
SILO is a very important aspect of technical SEO as it deals with keywords and the theme of the content. Proper SILOing involves the proper usage of keywords that go with the theme of the blog/post and categorizing the posts accordingly.
For instance, if you are writing an article about your software, using out-of-context keywords related to swimming won’t help. When Google sees that the targeted keywords are nowhere related to the content, your post will get ranked lower. That is why knowing the right ways of website SILOing is important. Here’s a quick guide:
Determine the site’s theme
As the website owner, you need to have a clear idea of the theme that your business is representing. There are a few questions that you must ask yourself while setting the site theme.
First, which subject themes are bringing you a high SEO ranking from Google? Second, which themes are in relevance to the content promoted by your website? Third, when a visitor is searching for your content, what will they look for?
Lastly, how can you create a better vision of the theme you are trying to display? Answering these few questions will help you decide the theme instantly. However, if you are still confused, you can sit down with your team and find out the theme together.
Do not overstuff keywords
Just because you can use keywords relevant to the theme doesn’t mean you should overuse them. The usual rule of thumb says that no word should be repeated for more than 3% in the text. However, the keyword density might vary depending on the themes you are exploring.
Use proper links
Make sure you use a few hyperlinks relevant to the topic. You can also use the links to sell your products. In that case, the topic must be relevant to the link ascribed to the content; otherwise,
the rule of SILOs won’t be followed, which might affect the ranking. And again, don’t overdo it. A hyperlink here and there is alright, but not several in each sentence.
Fixing Broken Links
Your technical SEO ranking can get adversely affected if there are broken links on your site. Here’s how we fix it:
Check for typos
Often, there is an error with the link due to an unwanted typo. So cross-check the spelling of every word or number in the link to ensure that there are no typos whatsoever.
Publish the linked page again
Have you deleted the page that was linked to your content? In that case, you can simply republish the page. However, if you no longer sell the product that the page sold, republishing it will be a bad idea. Instead, try the next option below!
Redirect the link
Another way of fixing a broken link is by redirecting it to a similar link. If you have another post relevant to the one linked previously, you can use the 301 redirecting feature. It will take your audience to a different page (with more or less similar information), and your ranking will grow!
Remove the broken link
Last but not least; you can delete the broken link entirely. Yes, it will not help you bring page views or increase the ranking. But if there’s no other resort, then deleting the link is a better option than having a broken link.
So here we come to an end with all discussions about technical SEO. Now we will dig deeper into target pages and find out how it will help you achieve a better ranking!
Target Pages
When you are designing the SEO of your content, you need to focus on the pages you want to target. If you are familiar with Facebook ads, you will know that there are also marketers who target pages to drive in the audience interested in similar products sold by the website.
But while designing a site, targeting pages requires different strategies. Usually, it is divided into on-page and off-page SEO. Some of the best practices for targeting the right pages and bringing in the right audience are:
- Having a strong keyword strategy. Make sure you use the right keywords – both primary and secondary
- Have a structured site so that Google understands your content easily
- Have a URL relevant to the theme of the content
- Focus on a fast loading speed of the site
- Insert proper links and build effective backlinks
Two of these strategies, site structuring and increasing the loading speed, are already discussed above. Now on to the On-Page SEO.
On-Page SEO
Most people divide SEO into two parts: on-page and off-page. In this section, we will be digging deeper into on-page SEO practices.
We focus on On Page SEO a LOT. We use SurferSEO for almost every on page SEO need.
Audits for old/existing pages and keyword research for new keywords and then creating content briefs.
This site didn’t really have anything solid in terms of content so we needed to start with writing content.
We wrote about 500 articles in a span of 5 months.
That’s 100 articles a month and every article had an average word count of 1,000 words
If you’re curious, if you also need to post 100 articles a month to scale your website… The answer is NO.
Different websites have different budgets, scalability and a different growth scope.
We did what’s best for THIS particular client. This is the reason why we were able to get such results.
And as we promised you, here’s our On Page SEO file that we use every time. Make sure to create a COPY of it.
We approach the process of finding new content ideas like this:
- Keyword Research
- Keyword Mapping
- Creating Content Briefs
- Writing
- On Page Optimisation Let’s dig in!
Keyword Research
We use this for the processes. It’s a pretty long and detailed article, so instead of making this post 3X longer than necessary, we encourage you to just click on the link and read everything there. The article goes into great detail on keywords and will teach you everything you need to know about them.
Keyword research can be very sporadic, so we have a google sheet that helps us map out the exact same process in a very approachable and easy way. We have a template that helps us map keywords and prepare a comprehensive keyword audit sheet. You can get one for yourself and it REALLY helps.
Writing
We hire a lot of writers from tier-2 countries and editors from tier-1 countries. This not only helps us bring our content writing expenses down but helps us create great quality content on scale. It’s like the best of both worlds.
We were able to see a lot of keywords starting to rank after the 1 most of publishing a 100 highly targeted keywords.
This didn’t happen just because of content of course, the domain already had some authority as it was an aged domain which definitely helped but the main strategy was getting questions related to that particular product answered as fast as possible.
Our key strategy here was targeting highly targeted queries & questions in that specific niche. What do we mean by that?
Here’s an example:
www.kinsta.com – This is a web hosting company that has been around for years. You get to notice a very interesting thing when you look at the pages driving them the most traffic…
They are writing on highly targeted queries which you couldn’t think of normally when you do your keyword research.
Your initial thought would to cover keywords like
- Best wordpress hosting
- Best hosting for beginners
- Buy wordpress hosting
- Buy cloud hosting Etc…
Here, these guys have not only targeted these keywords but they’re covering highly targeted long tail queries which helps in two ways.
- Very low competition = much easier to rank
- People see you as an authority and a knowledgeable, and trustable source in this space We implemented the same strategy, which helped us get great results in a short amount of time.
Imagine targeting 300+ targeted queries on a perfect SILO structure for your site.
On-page SEO also helps in driving huge amounts of traffic if done right. The practices involved in this are quite easy to pull off. If you are wondering what strategies we are talking about, here’s a list:
Upload high-quality content
No matter how good your SEO game is, if your content fails to impress, nothing will work. That is why it is highly suggested that you hire people who can deliver you high-quality content. It is from your site’s content where the audience and the search engine gather info about your brand.
Insert high-quality visual content as well but make sure that the size of the images and videos is small so that it does not hinder the site’s loading speed
Some tips for creating high-quality content are:
Choose topics that are relevant to your website.
For example, if you sell CRM for Digital Marketing Agencies, then publishing blogs about doing the best push ups won’t do. These two topics are not related at all. If you drive in visitors interested in push ups and not CRM, your software will not sell!
Keep the customer journey in mind when publishing your content.
Remember there are three stages of the customer journey
Awareness: Create content like blog posts and videos for the homepage
Consideration: Create detailed buyer’s guides and case studies about the products or services you are selling
Decision: Create product comparisons, demos, pricing, etc.
Do proper keyword research and use only relevant keywords.
Make sure you include both short-tail and long-tail keywords and insert them naturally within the content. Even if the keywords are promotional, they should go with the flow of the article.
Add enough CTA (call to action) in the content.
A few examples are ‘keep reading to know more, ‘share your experience with us,’ and so on. These are some of the best practices that you can follow to create premium quality content. Remember that if your site has enough shareable content, then you will gain high organic traffic!
Other On-Site SEO things you should keep in mind
Title of the Page
The title of any content plays a very important role in the website ranking. Therefore, the title must be written in a way that clearly says what the article is about. The page title must contain the main keyword and curiosity driving phrases that makes the reader click without hesitation.
Some additional suggestions for the page title are:
- Keep the title within 70 characters. The longer the title, the lower it’s ranking
- Do not use more than one keyword in the title
- Keep the title related to the topic discussed in the content
- Capitalize the title. For example- ‘The Ultimate Guide For SAAS Startups To Get 300 New Users A Day’
- Try to include your brand name and the current year in the title
Meta Description
When you search for something, you will see that many titles show up, and below each title, there is a short description of the article. That short info is called the meta description. It might not directly influence the SEO ranking, but indirectly, it decides whether or not a person will click on the link. For writing a decent quality meta description, here are a few of our best tips:
- Keep the meta description up to 160 characters. Meta descriptions of 220 characters are also allowed by Google, but it might create issues in other search engines. If you are targeting a mobile audience, then keep it below 120 characters
- Use at least one keyword in the context, but not more than two
- Make sure the meta description is engaging and relevant so people are more likely to click
Image Alt-text
Adding images has become super important for SEO ranking these days as Google delivers search results based on the images used as well. But images alone won’t help unless you provide a relevant image alt text to the content. Here are some strategies to follow while creating image alt text:
- Describe the image and be specific about the details
- Make sure that the description aligns with the image and the overall content
- Keep it under 125 characters
- Use keywords but don’t overdo it
Structured Data
Your website source code also decides your ranking; hence, optimizing it is a good idea. We are sure you have noticed various features like knowledge panels and snippets while searching for something in Google. Well, say thanks to structured data for such new features. It also makes the content info look organized when someone shares it on social media platforms.
Page URLs
If you look carefully, you will see that sites with a simpler page URL rank higher. Your page URL should not confuse people and must be relevant to the content you are sharing. Do not stuff your page URL with words that are not required or irrelevant. We would recommend you use keywords in the URL but not more than two.
Also, try to use HTTPS as frequently as possible because websites that use HTTPS get ranked better. This is because HTTPS, unlike HTTP, ensures a better user experience and improves the site’s overall security, making the place safe and comfortable for visitors.
Internal Linking
Internal linking or hyperlinking is the process of providing helpful links within the article. You can either send the readers to another blog on your website, relevant to the topic, or send them to some other site for more information.
However, we recommend you add more links to your own website because that would help you increase the page views and boost your Google ranking. The more time a visitor spends on your site, the more information Google gets about your platform. This will help Google understand your business better and give you a higher rank.
Mobile Compatibility
It is not strange to the world that the mobile market is becoming more dominant with each passing day. Google knows it too, and hence, it prefers those sites that have better mobile responsiveness. Therefore, you need to make sure that your website fits perfectly on both desktop and mobile. The loading speed, time, features, and usability should not be compromised when using the site on mobile!
Off-Page SEO
As the name suggests, Off-page SEO is the SEO strategy that you apply somewhere else than your brand website. These strategies help increase the brand’s overall reputation by making it more reliable in the eyes of the audience. It is much like advertising your site via some other websites, pages, or communities. Are you wondering what you should be doing to maintain your off-page SEO tactics? Here are some of our recommendations!
Building Links
Building proper backlinks is the core of off-page SEO. When you use the right links in the content, your SEO ranking gets heated up, making you a trustworthy brand in the market. Make sure that the link you use is from a popular site, has fresh content, and is secure for the users.
Also, the link attached in the content should be relevant to the blog you publish. The anchor text also plays an important role; hence, it should be chosen carefully.
Some types of links seen commonly in different blogs these days are:
Natural links
When someone naturally inserts a link into the context, it is termed natural linking. For example, if a photographer links an article related to the understanding of fashion photography, then it would be a natural link.
Manually built links
When someone links a site for promotion, it is called a manually built link. For instance, if a vlogger promotes a night cream and links the product in the video description, it will be a manually built link.
Pillow links
When you publish a link within a comment, forum etc using a well-optimized anchor text, it is termed self-created links. Many SEO technicians often loathe such linking, calling it black hat SEO, but a few brands do it anyway for a higher ranking.
Building Tier-2 Link to Power Up Tier-1 Whitehat Links
Another black hat SEO technique that search engines despise but work well every time is building more tier 2 links to power up the tier 1 whitehat links. If you do not understand what we are saying, here’s a brief:
- Start with writing a couple of good quality articles and link them to some of the best content on your website. You can do this for at least 10 to 15 articles at once. These articles are your asset for the tier 1 links.
- Now, create around a hundred more articles and attach the link of tier 1 articles in them. This bunch of blogs will become your tier 2 link collection. The more tier 2 blogs you create and link to tier 1, the stronger your off-page SEO game becomes!
Doing Good PR and Marketing
PR can prove to be a blessing if done right. With the type of brand we had, it was very easy to create a ‘viral news article’ and we knew that it’d definitely get some decent shares…
We can’t disclose the exact campaign because of an NDA with our client but here’s a hint.
This company pays people to try out their game…
This headline would definitely get the audience of a particular niche excited and after we implemented something similar, we got a great response and landed 100s of links naturally…
Lastly, you will need to spend enough on the right PR and marketing strategies to increase brand trust. Most brands are investing in social media marketing as it brings decent results at an affordable price.
You can easily hire a freelance social media marketer to start with Facebook and Instagram Ads for your brand. You can also get in touch with the influencers to market your business via them. If you have a small business, you can approach the budding influencers who work at a reasonable rate.
However, if you are looking for great results, we strongly recommend hiring a digital marketing agency. How to pick the best agency is a little tricky, though, so we’ve included a handy guide for you later on in this post.
The next trending off-page SEO technique is guest blogging. Here, you will have to hire guest bloggers from outside to write for your brand. This also helps in gaining more trust from the visitors. Usually, all of these jobs are managed by the PR team.
They also take time to time feedback from the audience to ensure that the site is functioning properly. The PR team is also responsible for answering any queries from the visitors. All of these together ensure that your off-page SEO is on point!
What to pay attention to
Now that you know the hacks of boosting your SEO ranking like never before, it’s time for you to learn the dos and don’ts that require your special attention. Remember, SEO is a technical job that requires perfection and attention to the detail.
If you do something wrong for too long without realizing it, Google will notice your activity and pull down the site’s ranking.
- Make sure that you are using only those keywords which are relevant to the theme of your content
- Never stuff all the keywords in one blog. If you want to use all the top-ranking keywords on your site, create more content and spread them around
- Include keywords in the title and meta description for a higher ranking
- Avoid black hat SEO practices, as that might provoke Google to ban your site. Once your site gets banned, retrieving it might get difficult
- Always use small-sized images and videos; compress them in case they are large
- Never mix one SILO with the other. One category or subcategory should deal with only one theme. Mixing them will confuse the visitors and Google, which will screw the site’s ranking
- Ensure that the loading speed is high throughout the day, in all locations, and on all devices
- Never use copied content because Google hates plagiarism. Not only you’ll rank lower, you’re also risking a ban from Google and being sued by the original owner
- Make sure that the site is structured well. Follow our tips for site structuring
- Do not create a difficult-to-understand website. Google prefers websites that have a user-friendly interface
How to outsource like a business owner that you are
We understand that this is a lot to take in at once. It’s time consuming and takes effort to apply everything we’ve talked about. But you don’t have to do all of this by yourself. You can outsource it. Either to an agency, or parts of it to freelancers.
Outsourcing, however, is a double edged sword. The market is full of people that aren’t necessarily the right type of people to help you with this. To help you find the right agency/person to help you with this, we’ve created a short list of things you should always check, before hiring anyone.
Know exactly what you are looking for
You need to be clear about what type of SEO services you’re going to be buying. This is based on how much you are going to do by yourself. You can outsource everything of course. But the 4 major categories with which freelancers and agencies could help you are:
- Keyword Research
- Content Creation
- On-Site optimizing
- Link Building
Of course there are more things, but these are the four major ones.
Review potential agencies and freelancers
Once you know what type of services you’re looking to outsource, it’s time to create a list of potential hires.
Before everything else, check if they have any reviews available. Chances are that people without any reviews are not a good fit. However, you have to pay attention to the reviews themselves. Look for specific results they’ve produced for their previous clients. The more specific the better. It’s nice if they are prompt, kind, responsive and so on… but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are good at what they do.
You can also ask in legitimate Facebook™ groups for recommendations. If one freelancer or an agency gets several referrals, you know they are doing their job well.
Red flags you should DEFINITELY say NO to
Beware people whose prices are too good to be true. If someone offers you 50k of links for $10, that’s a sign that something is fundamentally wrong.
Fast results sound nice on a paper, but the reality is different, especially when they are promising you fast ranking results. SEO isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. It’s close to impossible to predict how fast Google will respond to SEO strategies.
No specific ranking promises either. Anyone saying they can rank you X specifically is full of bologna.
Hire someone you connect with
Okay, ideally, now you have a few potential people you’d like to hire. But you can’t necessarily decide which one specifically. There’s an easy solution for that. Hire someone that you wouldn’t mind being friends with.
Yes, yes we know this is highly unusual, but if you are going to work with someone, might as well pick someone you get along with. Your gut feeling is usually right when it comes to picking people like that. So trust it and take that leap of faith.
Summary
The Unique Systematic SEO Processes (USSP) provide websites a way to get hundreds of thousands of new organic visitors each month. We’ve developed these processes for ourselves and our previous clients and realized there’s an easy way to teach it.
You now possess all necessary knowledge to increase your Google ranking which will ultimately skyrocket the number of visitors. I know this is a lot to take in all at once, but I am sure you’ll be able to do it. I mean…
If I was able to do this, there’s no way you wouldn’t be.
All you gotta do is take action. It doesn’t need to be perfect, it just need to be like 80% ready. You might be missing a thing or two but that’s okay, you’ll perfect it over time once you get some results.
Glossary
Refer to this chapter with any word you are unsure about. Also, we’ll talk about each of these in greater detail later on.
SEO Optimized content
Blogs, articles, website copy, ebooks, traninings, etc. that have been written using specific keywords
Keywords
Words people type into search engines when they’re looking for something
Technical SEO
Making sure it’s easier for the bots to go through your content and index you
Target pages
Should be closely aligned with what you do as its main purpose is to bring in traffic targeted for a specific keyword
On Page SEO
Everything you can do with keywords to help the site appear on the first page when searched for included keywords
Off Page SEO
Everything you can do outside of your website to increase its trustworthiness, relevance, and authority. (Other people, sites, articles, etc., linking your website and thus “vouching” for it
SILO
Content organization to into topics and categories
Black Hat
SEO strategies that are not supported highly by Google or violate the Google quality policies
Crawling
The process of how a search engine comes across your website
SERP or Search Engine Result Page
The page that appears when you search for something on the web
Organic
SEO results that are not obtained with the help of paid advertisement
Traffic
The number of visitors opening your website
White hat
SEO practices that comply with the search engine’s quality policies
404 error
A message shown when a visitor tries to open a page that has ceased to exist
Algorithm
A collection of various calculations and actions to obtain the ranking of the site
Analytics
A computerized system of analyzing vital data and statistics
Anchor text
A text in content that has a clickable link attached to it
Branded keywords
Keywords that contain the name of your brand
Conversion
Whenever a user completes some vital action, it is called a conversion. For instance, if he buys something or signs up for the daily newsletter, it will be counted as a conversion.
Dead link
A broken link that takes the visitor to a page that no longer exists
Backlink
A link on someone else’s site that brings the visitor to your website
SEM or Search Engine Marketing
Paid or organic marketing strategies for boosting the ranking of the site